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serial-killer
2012 · R · 1h 50m
Once you see him, nothing can save you.
A true-crime writer moves his family into a murder house without telling them, then finds a box of Super 8 home movies in the attic — each one a snuff film, each one featuring the same pale figure watching from the shadows.
Desperate for a comeback, true-crime writer Ellison Oswalt moves his family into a Pennsylvania home where an entire family was murdered and one child disappeared — without telling his wife or kids. When he discovers a box of Super 8 reels in the attic, each depicting a different family's ritualized slaughter, he begins to unravel the mythology of an ancient entity called Bughuul, the Eater of Children. He realizes too late that the films don't just document the killings. They enable them.
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True-crime writer Ellison Oswalt, chasing a comeback after years of middling work, moves his wife Tracy and their two children, Trevor and Ashley, into a suburban Pennsylvania house without telling them it is the site of the family's murder — a previous family was hanged from the tree in the backyard, one child unaccounted for. The local sheriff makes his contempt for Ellison's methods clear from the first day. While exploring the attic, Ellison finds a cardboard box of Super 8 reels and a projector. The reel labels are innocuous — Pool Party '66, Barbecue '79 — but when threaded through the projector each one is a snuff film: a different family, killed in an elaborately staged way. One is hanged from a tree. One is drowned bound in a backyard pool. One is burned alive in a car. In every reel, one child from the family is absent from the dead and presumed taken.
Studying the footage, Ellison begins to notice a recurring figure in the margins of each film — a tall, pale-faced entity with dark hollow eyes, appearing in reflections, in shadows, in the backgrounds of what otherwise look like ordinary family moments. A university professor specializing in the occult identifies a symbol recurring near each kill site and connects it to an ancient pagan deity named Bughuul, the Eater of Children, a figure said to inhabit images and use them to corrupt and lure children into his realm. The more Ellison watches and re-watches the films, drinking heavily and pulling away from his family, the more tightly the house seems to close around them. Trevor develops violent night terrors and sleepwalks into dangerous positions around the house, his body contorting in the dark. Ashley, quiet and artistic, starts drawing the murdered family she was never told about and refers to an imaginary friend named Stephanie — the missing girl from the previous massacre.
Further research reveals the pattern that will doom the Oswalts: each family in the films once lived in a house where a prior massacre occurred, then moved, and was subsequently slaughtered at their new address with one child disappearing into Bughuul's realm. The house is not the source of the curse. The curse follows the family when they leave. Ellison, terrified, burns the films and projector in the backyard and moves his family out — believing escape is still possible.
Back at their old home, things feel briefly calmer. Then Ellison finds the cardboard box in the attic again, intact and now containing an additional reel labeled Extended Cut Endings. Watching, he sees footage he missed: each film has a hidden final segment in which the missing child, clearly under some form of possession, is shown calmly filming the murders themselves before turning the camera toward Bughuul at the end. The children were the killers. A call from the professor confirms the pattern's completion: relocating the family does not break the chain. It triggers the final stage.
That night Ellison grows dizzy and collapses. He wakes bound and gagged beside a drugged Tracy and Trevor. Ashley, calm and remote, has laid plastic sheeting across the living room floor, positioned a camera, and taken up an axe. She films herself killing each family member in the same stylized, ritualized manner as the families in the reels, completing the cycle Bughuul's imaginary friend spent months steering her toward. When it is finished, she adds the new reel — House Painting '12 — to the box. Bughuul appears in the attic above her. Ashley is absorbed into whatever realm the entity inhabits, taken as all the other children were taken.
The final image is the box of films sitting in the attic of a new house, waiting for the next family to find it and begin the cycle again.
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